Of course high modernists described the tempering nature of art in different ways. In his essay “The Sense of the Past,” Trilling defended the modernist canon for the “historical sense” it provided readers, serving as a quelling agent for the will’s innate aggression.46 Trilling argued that the literary work functioned as a form of estrangement because it opened a window to a moment of reality no longer recoverable and no longer understandable. In contrast to liberals and Communists who sought redemption in forthcoming utopias, Trilling turned to the past. This sense of history provided a moment beyond ideology—“without the sense of the past we might be more certain, less weighted down and apprehensive” (185). Naturally, Trilling was not promoting some antiquarian impulse. To acknowledge the “pastness” of a work of art, he argued, was to acknowledge it as a “thing we can never wholly understand.” Aggressive contemplation was retarded by “the mystery, the unreachable part” of the artwork that was irreducible to “ideological or subjective distortion” (180). Any particular meaning derived from a historically distinct piece of literature was therefore incomplete. For Trilling, “we ought to have it fully in mind that our abstraction is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which we have abstracted” (189). This “historical sense” provided by art counted as “one of the aesthetic and critical faculties” that aided the individual in escaping his own subjective “abstractions” (188).
Like Trilling, Theodor Adorno argued that if totalitarian ideologies strove to awaken the primal aggression of man, modern art might serve to temper that impulse. But in contrast to Trilling, Adorno described the reception of the aesthetic object as a form of mimesis. He reformulated the concept to refer not to the imitative reproduction of nature but to the spectator’s role in the consumption of the aesthetic object.47 In order to avoid the reductive translation of the artwork by preformed categories of thought, the spectator needed, according to Adorno, to imitate or mimic the movements within the object itself. The spectator was to trace mentally the internal dynamics of the work, following the contours of the painterly strokes, the trajectories of the musical refrain, and the rhythmic articulations of the poetic verse. In other words, the spectator did “not understand a work of art” when it was translated “into concepts” but rather when the spectator was “immersed in its immanent movement,” that is, when the work was “recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it.”48 The aesthetic experience was receptive and sensuous, offering a form of knowing separate from conceptual domination. Since the spectator did “not actually think” but instead made himself “into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it,” the aesthetic experience produced a momentary hesitation in the individual and a sense of wonderment, effects that served to loosen the rigidity of the individual ego.49
The spectator of course was not entirely passive. The aesthetic experience required active effort—an attentiveness to artistic detail and a knowledge of previous artistic traditions. High modernism was nothing if not deeply intellectual. But the experience of high art was not reducible to an understanding of technique; indeed, the works themselves produced their own standard of judgment to which the spectator submitted. As Adorno argued, “the ability to see works of art from the inside … is probably the only form in which aesthetics is still possible.”50 This aesthetic experience avoided both the complete loss of self associated with total immersion in the object and the domination of it associated with cognitive manipulation. Mimesis taught the spectator to respect the otherness of the other by momentarily relaxing the need to grasp and repress and by momentarily suspending the cognitive for a form of perception much closer to the erotic. As such, the aesthetic experience “may contain the potential to counteract the deterioration of human capacities—what would be called ‘ego weakness’ in current psychological terminology” (102). Adorno was not alone in his speculations; his reconsideration of mimesis as the elemental principle of aesthetics was in fact prefigured by the New Critics. For example, in his 1938 essay, “The Mimetic Principle,” John Crowe Ransom argued that “the doctrine of mimesis” was “the best foundation for any aesthetic.”51 Mimesis, according to Ransom, aimed for “a kind of cognition” that “grows increasingly difficult for us in practical life”—the ability to carefully attend to the particularities of the aesthetic object by “[tracing] its configurations, colors, planes, [and] objects” in the spirit of an erotic “love” that ran counter to the motives of “power,” “appetite,” or “greed” (206). As such, the aesthetic experience taught patience and respect, loosening the borders of the ego but without loosening the destructive tendencies of the drives or the hostile forces of the superego.
In this way, the aesthetic experience became the antidote to the compulsions of the liberal imagination and pointed to a form of identity that was less petrified—a mature and nonrepressive ego with a more intimate relationship to itself and to the natural world. The aesthetic experience, at least one that was uninvolved in persuasion or propaganda, was a way to sway the boundaries of the ego and force the subject to abandon itself, if only for a moment, to the irreducible particularity of the art object. This experience helped to transform a self that was hopelessly and aggressively trapped within its own immediacy into a self that was attentive to the variegated nature of reality. Aesthetic contemplation also prodded the return of the sensuous from its repression by the ego and the superego. Naturally, such a return served neither as a form of orgasmic release nor as a means for simple enjoyment. Instead, it provided a release from the compulsive nature of the ego and a general openness to the individual’s lost archaic impulses. Moreover, it served to channel desire in and through the aesthetic object so that such desire was neither captured by the glittering appeals of the culture industry nor funneled into mass politics. Modern art taught the spectator to “not become stupid, not to be lulled to sleep, not to go along” but also not to dominate and not to coerce.52 Of course, since the current landscape had fallen into the hands of administrators, any reconciliation of the self with the larger world was impossible. The fundamental divisions within modernity prevented any such reconciliation, leaving individual subjectivity mediated only by a relationship to the aesthetic sphere. This notion of a nonrepressive ego autonomy became for high modernists the best solution for dealing with the aggression of the self produced paradoxically by its exhaustion.
The Challenge of David Riesman
Thus, despite the rigor of its theoretical formulations, high modernism seemed to breathe desperation—over the apparent liquidation of the subject, over the failures of prewar and postwar social movements, and over the creeping tide of totalitarianism. As Clement Greenberg observed, “the present age as much as any in history lacks an operative notion, a viable concept of the human being—a lack that is one of the ‘still centers’ around which the crisis of our times revolves.”53 Consequently, utopian speculations were found in high modernist discourse in a strictly negative way. The reconstitution of ego autonomy through the tempering impulse of modernist art was a benign response to an intractable situation. Adorno himself admitted his frustrations in his 1951 memoir, Minima Moralia: “In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference